Nicole Avant Reveals Cover for Book on Grief and Forgiveness 19 Months After Mom Jacqueline’s Murder (Exclusive)

Nicole Avant is revealing the cover of her upcoming book, Think You’ll Be Happy: Moving through Grief with Grit, Grace, and Gratitude. Described by the author as being “part memoir” and “part guide,” it will share with readers how she processed the devastating loss of her mother Jacqueline Avant, an 81-year-old philanthropist who was fatally shot in her Beverly Hills home by an intruder in December 2021.

“The book helped a lot,” Avant, 55, tells PEOPLE about mourning her mom. “I was writing for quite some time, but I obviously changed after my mom’s death. Everyone says, ‘One day at a time.’ It was literally, for me, one minute at a time. I would literally have to say that to myself, ‘One minute at a time. Just one minute.’ Each minute, one minute.”

Avant’s life was forever changed in the early hours of Dec. 1, 2021, when Aariel Maynor, a convicted robber out on parole, broke into her parents’ home and shot her mother.

The murder shocked some of Hollywood’s biggest stars; celebs like Oprah Winfrey and filmmaker Tyler Perry, who Jacqueline and her husband, legendary music producer Clarence Avant, counted as friends. For their daughter what followed was a mixture of disbelief and pain, wrapped in fury.

“It was so overwhelming and so exhausting,” Avant says of those initial weeks that included detectives coming to her parents’ home during their investigation. “You’re still in the state of shock that you’re even having these conversations. Every day they’d leave, and I’d look at myself in the mirror again going, ‘Wait a minute. Is this really happening? Is this really happening right now?’”

But Avant, who is married to Netflix’s co-CEO Ted Sarandos, had a surviving parent, who had just lost his wife of more than five decades, to think about. Her focus changed. “I would say, ‘Nicole, who are you going to show up as? You have an almost 91-year-old [father],” she says of Clarence, who now lives with her and her husband. “My main concern was to make sure that he felt as nurtured and as safe and as loved as possible.”  

Avant says that her mother also inspired her to keep going. “I felt that she was energetically pushing me to move on, to stand up. I actually became my mom. I decided, when I answered the question of, ‘Who am I going to be?’ it was really, ‘What would Jacquie do right now?’”

Avant continues, “I know her. She would’ve had us all sit up, get focused, divvy out everything. ‘This is how we’re going to show up.’ She always had the saying of, ‘You can’t make believe that it didn’t happen.’

“Every challenge I’ve had in life, she’d always say, ‘Okay, but you can’t believe this didn’t happen. So, you have to own it, remind yourself that this is real, and then make a decision from that space.’ So, I kind of became her.

“It didn’t take away that it was shocking, traumatic, painful, scary, any of those things. But I still chose to show up for life, feeling those feelings. I was not going to give up.”

In Think You’ll Be Happy, Avant will also share with readers how she came to forgive her mother’s killer who was sentenced to three life terms in April 2022. She says, “When I say I forgive him, I do not condone anything about that night. Not his actions, nothing about that night do I condone.”

For Avant, forgiveness allows her to not let the fury she feels overtake her. She says, “It’s a daily thing. I’m not going to let this anger consume me because it’s only me drinking the poison. Forgiveness is never condoning a bad act of any kind, but it is a recipe to keep poison out of yourself.”

It was a call from author and preacher Bishop T. D. Jakes about 72 hours after her mother’s death that also helped the writer process her grief and reframe the way she would eventually view the tragedy.

Avant recalls, “He said, ‘You have to make a decision right now. Are you going to focus on the five minutes, the end of your mom’s life? Are you going to focus on that, or are you going to shift your focus and think about the 81 years of her life and how she lived? This is what I want you to start working on.' And it was the best advice I could get.”

Focusing on Jacqueline’s legacy, her charitable work and advocacy on issues like poverty and education has gone a long way to help Avant process her grief. She says, “It was a constant reminding myself of the best way to honor my mom is to really live as fully as I can, even in the pain, even in the sadness, even in the tragedy. I owe her that. I can give her that.”

Aside from that, the simple act of moving through grief has been invaluable and this is what Avant hopes readers will get from Think You’ll Be Happy.

“Just sitting outside, and looking at flowers, and taking my shoes off, and walking on the grass, and making sure I would get grounded, and sitting in silence and then crying it out,” she explains. “Moving through grief as opposed to just sitting with it.”

Referencing her family’s tragedy, she says later, “It’s not really something you get over. It’s something you go through, and you move through ... I’m not as shocked as I was [19 months ago]. I’m still devastated, but the shock has gone, and the trauma has gone, bits by bits.

“But the devastation, how could it leave? It’s just a devastating act. But, again, the book is about how to move through it and how to still find joy in life.”  

Think You’ll Be Happy: Moving through Grief with Grit, Grace, and Gratitude will be out in bookstores on Oct. 17, 2023.